“How do you find him?” asked Mrs. Bidlake, when her daughter came down.
Elinor did not answer, but turned away her face. The question had brought the tears rushing into her eyes. Mrs. Bidlake put her arms round her and kissed her. Elinor hid her face against her mother’s shoulder. “You must be strong,” she kept saying to herself. “You mustn’t cry, mustn’t break down. Be strong. To help him.” Her mother held her more closely. The physical contact comforted her, gave her the strength for which she was praying. She made an effort of will and with a deep intaken breath swallowed down the sobs in her throat. She looked up at her mother and gratefully smiled. Her lips still trembled a little; but the will had conquered.
“I’m stupid,” she said apologetically. “I couldn’t help it. It’s so horrible to see him suffer. Helplessly. It’s dreadful. Even if one knows that it’ll be all right in the end.”
Mrs. Bidlake sighed. “Dreadful,” she echoed, “dreadful,” and closed her eyes in a meditative perplexity. There was a silence. “By the way,” she went on, opening them again to look at her daughter, “I think you ought to keep an eye on Miss Fulkes. I don’t know whether her influence is always entirely good.”
“Miss Fulkes’s influence?” said Elinor, opening her eyes in astonishment. “But she’s the nicest, the most conscientious …”
“Oh, not that, not that!” said Mrs. Bidlake hastily. “Her artistic influence, I mean. When I went up to see Phil the day before yesterday I found her showing him such dreadfully vulgar pictures of a dog.”
“Bonzo?” suggested Elinor.
Her mother nodded. “Yes, Bonzo.” She pronounced the word with a certain distaste. “If he wants pictures of animals, there are such excellent reproductions of Persian miniatures at the British Museum. It’s so easy to spoil a child’s taste. … But Elinor! My dear!”
Suddenly and uncontrollably, Elinor had begun to laugh. To laugh and to cry, uncontrollably. Grief alone she had been able to master. But grief allied with Bonzo was irresistible. Something broke inside her and she found herself sobbing with a violent, painful, and hysterical laughter.
Mrs. Bidlake helplessly patted her shoulder. “My dear,” she kept repeating. “Elinor!”
Roused from uneasy and nightmarish dozing, John Bidlake shouted furiously from the library. “Stop that cackling,” commanded the angry-plaintive voice, “for God’s sake!”
But Elinor could not stop.
“Screaming like parrots,” John Bidlake went on muttering to himself. “Some idiotic joke. When one isn’t well …”
“Now, for God’s sake,” said Spandrell roughly, “pull yourself together.”
Illidge pressed his handkerchief to his mouth; he was afraid of being sick. “I think I’ll lie down for a moment,” he whispered. But when he tried to walk, it was as though his legs were dead under him. It might have been a paralytic who dragged himself to the sofa.
“What you need is a mouthful of spirits,” said Spandrell. He crossed the room. A bottle of brandy stood on the sideboard, and from the kitchen he returned with glasses. He poured out two fingers of the spirit. “Here. Drink this.” Illidge took and sipped. “One would think we were crossing the channel,” Spandrell went on with ferocious mockery as he helped himself to brandy. “Study in green and ginger—that’s how Whistler would have described you now. Apple-green. Moss-green.”
Illidge looked at him for a moment, then turned away, unable to face the steady glance of those contemptuous grey eyes. He had never felt such hatred as he now felt for Spandrell.
“Not to say frog-green, slime-green, scum-green,” the other went on.
“Oh, shut up!” cried Illidge in a voice that had recovered some of its resonance and hardly wavered. Spandrell’s mockery had steadied his nerves. Hate, like brandy, is a stimulant. He took another burning gulp. There was a silence.
“When you feel like it,” said Spandrell, putting down his emptied glass, “you can come and help me clear up.” He rose and walked round the screen, out of sight.
Everard Webley’s body was lying where it had fallen, on its side, with the arms reaching out across the floor. The chloroform-soaked handkerchief still covered the face. Spandrell bent down and twitched it away. The temple which had been struck was against the floor; seen from above, the face seemed unwounded.
His hands in his pockets, Spandrell stood looking down at the body.
“Five minutes ago,” he said to himself, formulating his thoughts in words, that his realization of their significance might be the more complete, “five minutes ago, it was alive, it had a soul. Alive,” he repeated and balancing himself unsteadily on one leg, with the other foot he touched the dead cheek, he pushed forward the ear and let it flick back again. “A soul.” And for a moment he allowed some of his weight to rest on what had been Everard Webley’s face. He withdrew his foot; the print of it remained, dust-grey, on the white skin. “Trampling on a dead face,” he said to himself. Why had he done it? “Trampling.” He raised his foot again and pressed his heel into the socket of the eye, gently, tentatively, as though experimenting with outrage. “Like grapes,” he thought. “Trampling wine out of the grapes.” It was in his
